Like other migrants to California, Scott Gregory* came with a golden dream. “You can use the bathroom there,” Gregory thought, then 20. “They’ll give you your testosterone, they’ll give you your top surgery, you’ll be safe there.” He had friends back in Michigan, a community of queer and trans people on a Native American reservation near the Canadian border. But when his dad tried to kill him — “There will be no Two-Spirits in our family,” Gregory remembers him saying — he took a redeye to San Jose. In his backpack, he brought a buckskin medicine pouch, powwow regalia, and letters friends had sent him when he’d gone to conversion therapy, a practice meant to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity that’s banned in 13 states.

His aunt lived on Golden Hills Drive in Milpitas, just northeast of the city near the bottom tip of the San Francisco Bay. She’d been the one to take Gregory back-to-school shopping for boys’ clothes when he was a teenager. She’d paid for his plane ticket, too; she was sick, and he’d planned to help take care of her. But she hadn’t said how sick she was. Gregory arrived December 3. She died December 22. She'd been the only California member of the family who'd supported him, and after a dark month in bed, Gregory couldn't stomach his uncle's house any longer. Reeling from grief and the new hormones he’d started, Gregory went to a shelter.

There, a staff member called him a “tranny,” a resident threatened to kill him, and another punched him in the face. He took to sleeping outside, sometimes in St. James Park in downtown San Jose, sometimes in “Hobo Alley” on Santa Clara Street, and sometimes in the beds of older “cringey” men he met on Grindr. He did get top surgery after obtaining the referral letter from a therapist that most surgeons require, but because he didn’t have a place, he had to stay in a board-and-care in East San Jose that had bed bugs. Infection from the bites sent him back to the hospital. “My chest opened up and is ruined now,” he says.

In San Jose, where a trans Pride flag has flown above the county building each June, median rent for a two-bedroom is $2,626. Driveways are clogged with too many cars, the result of two or three families piled into one house. Young straight people live with their parents deep into their 20s, but queer and trans people frequently don’t have that option. California’s homeless population shot up 13.7 percent between 2016 and 2017, making up a quarter of the nation’s homeless; 29 percent of Santa Clara County’s homeless youth identify as LGBTQ+.

Queer and trans people have been showing up with nothing in California cities for decades, ever since the Navy dropped sailors for homosexual conduct with “blue” discharges in San Francisco after World War II. We arrived in such great numbers and organized so persistently that we’ve got the strongest laws in the country: job protections, surgery for trans inmates, nonbinary gender markers on driver’s licenses. Those laws, which are real and hard-won, draw LGBTQ+ people to California like siren songs. But do good laws matter if you have nowhere to sleep?

Gavin Newsom kicked off his first online ad campaign for California governor with a treacly video about the same-sex marriages he performed as San Francisco mayor in 2004, aimed squarely at nice liberals. He’s courageously pro-LGBTQ+, the video tells voters. It’s working — he’s enjoyed a wide lead since winning the June primary.

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But California has the country’s highest poverty rate, almost entirely because of the housing crisis, as trans Californians like Gregory know well. In Los Angeles County alone, about 600,000 people spend 90 percent of their income on rent, leaving virtually nothing left over for food and transportation. The state lacks a million apartments for very-low-income people, and though the state set aside almost $5 billion this year for affordable housing and homelessness, rent prices continue to soar. Years into the housing crisis, the state legislature couldn’t pass a high-density housing bill this spring, and homeowners “uncomfortable” around poor people have stymied local affordable housing efforts. On the rental front, Newsom is virtually indistinguishable from his Republican opponent.

Newsom argues his plan to create more housing will reduce rent, which is unlikely in Gregory’s San Jose, where developers told the city council in April that already-sky-high rent would have to be 25 percent higher on any new housing they build. None of the 58 counties in the state has enough affordable housing to meet demand, but during primary season, Newsom argued he’d build more housing than had ever been built in a year for seven straight years, a goal so lofty experts called it impossible.

Newsom claimed to reduce San Francisco’s street homelessness by 12,000 people, but 5,000 of the city’s homeless simply got bus tickets to leave, and the crisis worsened after he left office to become lieutenant governor. In 2010, he spearheaded San Francisco’s sit-lie ordinance, which made it a crime to take up space on a sidewalk, to vigorous opposition from homeless advocates. Neither does he support this year’s ballot initiative to restore cities’ ability to allow rent control, likely because real estate billionaires like George and Judith Marcus, who oppose the measure, are among the top contributors to his campaign, along with the powerful landlords of the California Apartment Association.

Newsom’s California sounds dreamy for LGBTQ+ people — if you’ve got money. But without a well-paying job, affording rent in coastal cities is almost impossible, especially for trans people facing stigma from landlords, who hold all the power in California’s housing market. And when straight politicians tweet photos from Pride festivities but oppose efforts to shift power away from landlords, vulnerable queer and trans renters face the consequences.

“A ton of landlords will not rent to someone, even if they have the income, even if they could show proof of employment. They have the ability to just say 'no,'” says Lisa Willmes, program director at Recovery Café San Jose, a trans-friendly center for people dealing with addiction, mental health issues, and homelessness in downtown San Jose. California has prohibited housing discrimination against trans people since 2004, but in practice it’s difficult to enforce. “There’s no way to prove that you were discriminated against because you’re trans,” Willmes says.

I met Jaime Espinoza, 28, at Recovery Café San Jose, a cheerful space open five days a week where, in addition to recovery support groups and job skills training, visitors can get a meal or a latte made with donated beans from high-end Chromatic Coffee down the street. Espinoza makes $14.75 an hour at Macy’s in Westfield Oakridge mall. “It’s barely enough to even rent a room,” she says. Unlike a lot of the other trans women who come to Recovery Café, she’s got stable housing with her grandmother on the East Side. But she doesn’t hang out at home, because her grandmother deadnames her daily. “I just kind of try and ignore it and interact with her as little as possible,” she says. Moving somewhere cheaper isn’t an option, since it requires savings. “We live month-to-month as it is,” says Espinoza. Besides, she grew up here.

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Gregory, now 23, is similarly locked into the area. He needs a regular supply of hormones, a trans-friendly therapist, and trans-aware doctors he can trust, which he’s found at the Valley Homeless Healthcare Program’s clinic at Alexian. Otherwise, he’d live with his grandmother in Crescent City, a tiny beach town near the Oregon border. He looks for housing regularly on Craigslist and Facebook groups, and he’s constantly asking new friends if they’d take him on as a roommate. “Prices are ridiculous,” he says. “Oh my goodness. $2000 for a crappy room?”

He was lucky to find temporary placement at a residential facility for adults with mental health issues, since he deals with PTSD and gender dysphoria. And trans people with especially severe cases can sometimes find permanent supportive housing. Idanna Marin, 50, another patient at the Alexian clinic, floats through the Recovery Café in a flowy patterned shirt and pearlescent earrings. A transplant from Chicago and the Philippines before that, Marin was homeless on-and-off for years in San Jose but moved into a one-bedroom duplex downtown when she left rehab last year through a transitional housing program aimed at the newly sober. When I met her, she was cleaning up the salad bar, spray bottle in hand, as part of her volunteer shift at the café.

“I love it,” she gushes. “Oh my God. I have a place to go home, take a shower, you know, everything.”

Marin is bubbly. She met a trans woman on the bus last week who told her she seemed “fun,” but she’s still learning what fun means for her after decades spent struggling with addiction. Her apartment is sobriety-dependent, too. “I don’t want to lose my housing, because struggling on the street is really hard,” she says.

Advocates are scrambling to open an LGBTQ-focused homeless shelter before the end of the year, when the rains return and Santa Clara County’s only gay supervisor, who championed LGBTQ+ services for the last 12 years, leaves office. The shelter is meant to provide safety, free of the threats and mistreatment that Gregory and others have endured. But a 12-bed shelter won’t bring rent prices down or convince a landlord to rent to a trans person.

It won’t restore the luster to Gregory’s California dream, either. Three years after his cross-country move, he still calls the reservation his home. “That’s what it feels like, even though I’m at risk of being killed there,” he says. He wouldn’t recommend California to trans folks from other parts of the country. “I’d say go to Oregon.”

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